Wow, what an exciting time for real-time 3D enthusiasts!
Epic released the UDK for PC: the Unreal Development Kit based on the famous Unreal 3 Engine! For non-commercial/Edu use it's totally free. And for commercial use there is a very reasonable and transparent pricing:
- Internal Use: 2.500 US $ per developer seat per year
- Publishing: 25% royalties for revenues above 5000 US $
- Internal Use may stack with publishing thus: per seat per year plus royalties
You can read it directly on their site. Checkout the features, here some highlights:
- SpeedTree included – with editor
- global illumination solver
- Bink Video Codec
- Animation is driven by an AnimTree
- animated Facial normal maps using a visual scripting system
- slicing of objects for physics-based destructions
- distributed assets processing
- automated creation of navigation meshes for pathfinding
- visual shader creation system
- and much more of the "usual" Unreal Engine stuff 😉
Another YAY 😀
One important note though: this is basically the modding access. No source code access. So this may mean that if you can't script what you need, you won't be able to implement it.
Times. They are a-interesting!
thx. corrected.